Kevin Ford who is a principle member of the team behind the Library of Congress’ BIBFRAME effort — a modern replacement for the aging MARC standard — gives an update on its status, and addresses a controversy about whether it’s “webby” enough. (I liveblogged a session about this at LODLAM.)

Libraries traditional have had ideals: To secure a significant record, meeting needs of users, access to collections, etc. He states “the bleeding obvious,” beginning with “Oonly the library can save us all.” Libraries are in a unique position. Libraries are trusted, they are the keepers of knowledge and order, librarians care about truth. Librarians are “nice but firm.” And it’s a global institution: Librarians from different cultures understand one another

But what will happen when we have digital books, he asks. The vendors are “small potatoes,” he says, which means they don’t have a lot of time or resource to refashion libraries and save the library world. The infrastructure is aging. There’s fear about the future. MARC is not the right format for the future. For one thing, it’s untyped and it’s unvalidated. And there’s no model except for the cataloging rules.

Topic maps are a perfect match, he says. They’re all about metadata, enable merging and sharing, provide a model, and a global identity.